India farmers threaten cheap car factory

When India's Tata Motors announced plans to
build the world's cheapest car, it hailed the $US2,500 ($A2,899) mini marvel as a revolution for the world's poor.

30 August 2008

When India's Tata Motors announced plans to

build the world's cheapest car, it hailed the $US2,500 ($A2,899) mini marvel as a revolution for the world's poor.

But about an hour up the highway from Calcutta, past where the city's mildewing apartment blocks give way to lush rice paddies and vegetable plots, the hundreds of poor farmers who say they were

forced from their land to make way for Tata's car factory had a different kind of revolution in mind.

They launched a nearly two-year campaign of often-violent protests that is now threatening what is arguably India's most high-profile industrial project.

Who wins the fight over the Tata factory is likely to have wide-ranging impacts on India's push to complete a China-like economic transformation that the country's leaders say is needed to lift hundreds of millions of its 1.1 billion people out of poverty.

But the battle goes beyond mere economics - it also offers a snapshot of a still poor and largely traditional society in flux as farmers wrestle with the loss of steady, if meagre, livings and the uncertainty that comes with being factory workers.

"Tata is saying they will give us jobs. But there is no guarantee that my son or his son will get the same jobs," says Becharam Manna, a 38-year-old farmer. "When we have land, we know

every generation is secure."

Manna's sentiment is not universal in Singur, where some gladly sold their land to the government of West Bengal state, which then turned over 997 acres (400 hectares) to Tata.

Officials insist most farmers willingly sold. But many farmers say they gave it up only after being threatened by police and, in some cases, attacked by thugs from the Communist Party of India, which has long governed West Bengal.

Those farmers, along with West Bengal's leading opposition politicians and thousands of their supporters, have for the past six days blockaded the highway running past the factory - a last stand they say won't be abandoned until some 400 acres (160 hectares) is given back.

"It's a battle of nerves now - it's who can hold stronger," said Manna, who's among those organising the daily rallies, speeches and flag-waving marches along the highway.

Officials say they can't return the land, and Tata is threatening to find a new site if the protests continue, even though it has already poured $US350 million ($A405.99 million) into the project and such a move would certainly push back the planned October launch of the car, called the Nano.

The company temporarily suspended work in Singur on Friday after angry protesters laid siege to the plant the night before, trapping scores of workers inside for hours.

"A fear psychosis is being created to slow down certain projects of national importance," said Mukesh Ambani, the head of energy and petrochemical conglomerate Reliance Industries, in a statement earlier this week.

Reliance, like Tata, is one of India's largest industrial concerns, and Ambani said, "Indian industry must be encouraged to make such large investments in order to build the country's

competitiveness."

At the heart of the battle is land, one of India's scarcest resources. India is less than one-third the size of the United States but has almost four times as many people, and officials say farms must be plowed under to turn the country into a global economic power.

That's easier said than done in a country where more than 700 million people live off the land.

It's the height of the annual monsoon in Singur and the land's richness is on display. Deep green rice paddies stretch for miles from embankments where simple mud-brick, clay-roofed houses are built. Cows and goats cool themselves in watery paddies.

Palm trees sway along the edges of the small man-made ponds that Bengalis use for everything from raising fish to bathing.

"See this land? How can we say 'come in, spoil it, build on it.' Land like this is sacred, it is like religion," says Samtosh Porel, a 63-year-old whose one-third-acre (0.1-hectare) plot lies yards

(meters) from the site of the factory.

He works it with his two sons and freely admits the land has left him poor. "Look at me," he says when asked about money. He's only wearing a dirty red checkered lungi, a cloth men wrap around their

waists, and is limping along a rutted dirt road with the help of a broken crutch.

But he has a house, and "my sons have the land when I die. That is how we live," he says.

Not everyone in Singur is such a die-hard traditionalist. A few hundred metres down the road, Ashok Dhara, lounging in the shade near where the factory's boundary wall now bisects his old fields, says the factory's arrival has turned him into an unapologetic capitalist.

The 42-year-old sold his 1-acre (half-hectare) plot for 1.2 million Indian rupees ($A34,798) - "So much money, how could I refuse?" he says, rubbing his fingers together in the sign that

means money in any language.

About a third of the money went to buy three smaller plots a few miles away, and the rest was put in the bank where it earns 10 per cent interest, more than the 30,000 rupees ($A869) he used to earn each year from the rice, potatoes and wheat he grew.

Plus, "Tata is promising me a job," he adds. It's going to be unskilled labour - hauling loads, cleaning. But it will pay about 5,000 rupees ($A144) a month.

He's got a few things he needs to do with the money - fix up his house, pay for his sons' schooling, set aside a dowry for his daughter.

But then, he smiles, "I want a Nano."

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